"The Calumet facility?"
"Lease expired six months ago. But there's a second property. A cold storage building on the old rail line near 130th. Viktor's construction company poured the foundation four years ago. It's not in his name. It's in the name of a subcontractor who went bankrupt last year."
"Address."
Dmitri reads it to me from his phone. I commit it to memory.
"How many men can you have there in an hour?" I ask.
"Eight. Ten if Gregor pulls his crew from the townhouse."
"Pull them. Viktor's not going back to his townhouse. He's in the building with her. He'll stay close to her because he needs to be able to produce her when he thinks I've agreed."
I push off the wall and walk to the coat closet.
"Dmitri."
"Pakhan."
"Call Mikhail. Tell him I need a field kit for a Type 1 diabetic. Insulin, glucometer, glucose tabs, IV supplies. Everything she might need. We’ll pick it up on the way."
"Done."
I check the Makarov. Full magazine. I take a second magazine from the drawer in the hall table and put it in my inside pocket, next to the phone that still holds the sound of her voice saying my name.
"You know what to do," I say to Dmitri. He knows it’s not a question. “The Pakhan does not tolerate threats to his family. Even from family. There will be no negotiation. You get a shot,” I lift my eyes to his, “ you take it.”
I walk to the car.
Sadie
The sound of his voice stays in my head like a handprint.
I'm coming.
I hold onto it. I press it into the folds of my memories and I keep it there the way I keep a glucose tab under my tongue, something small and vital dissolving slowly into my bloodstream.
The door closed behind the man who seems to be the boss, Viktor, ten minutes ago. Maybe fifteen. Time has gone strange in this room. It stretches and compresses without warning, elastic in a way that makes my brain itch because I know what that means. Altered time perception is an early cognitive symptom. My sugar is climbing.
I can feel it starting. A thickness behind my eyes. A faint metallic taste at the back of my throat that isn't quite thirst. My mouth is dry and my lips are cracked and the water bottle on the table is two feet closer than it was an hour ago because Viktor moved it before he left.
He moved it after the phone call. He walked back in, slipped the phone into his pocket, looked at me for a long moment, then picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and held it to my mouth.
I drank. I hated myself for it, but I drank, because dehydration accelerates DKA and dying of pride in a warehouse is not a storyI'm willing to be part of. The water was warm and tasted like plastic and I swallowed three mouthfuls before he pulled it away and set it back on the table with the cap off. Close enough that I could see it. Still too far to reach.
He didn't say anything while I drank. He just watched me with an expression I've been trying to figure out ever since, something between curiosity and calculation, the face of a man assessing the value of an asset he's holding.
That's what I am to him. An asset. A piece on a board I didn't know I was part of until the hands closed over my mouth in the alley this morning and the world went sideways and dark.
But Viktor talked on the phone. He talked to Nick with the door open, and sound carries in concrete rooms, and I heard enough.
Step aside.I heard that clearly. Andsuccession.Andyour father,spoken with the particular weight of a man invoking a dead brother's memory as leverage. I heardthe girl comes homeandunderstanding,and from those fragments I've built enough of the picture to know what this is.
Viktor wants Nick's position and he took me to get it.
The simplicity of it is almost worse than the fear. I'm sitting in a warehouse with zip ties cutting into my wrists and my blood sugar climbing because one old man wants a bigger chair, and the man I love is somewhere on the other side of this city making decisions that will either bring me home or get us both killed.
I think about the captains' meeting. Nick told me about it afterward, lying in bed with his arm behind his head and his voice carefully neutral. He said Viktor questioned his judgment in front of the senior men. He said Viktor used the word "distraction" and everyone in the room knew he meant me. Nick didn't tell me what he said in response, but Dmitri did, two dayslater, in the kitchen while Nick was on a call. Dmitri told me Nick compared me to his mother. Told the room that no one had questioned his father's marriage during a war.
